Microsoft’s position in the world of developers has taken a significant upturn as the Redmond, Wash.-based giant has embraced the worldwide community of 31 million.
If one could highlight the resonant themes from the opening sessions at its annual developer conference, Microsoft Build, this week, then artificial intelligence, data, and cloud ubiquity would lead the pack. Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella used his keynote to make a raft of announcements, all of which were focused, in his words, “on building what the world needs.”
Microsoft Build 2022’s important announcements included the following:
- Nadella kicked off with the notion of “developer flow,” a term suggesting that vendors must fit into the brain streams common in development. “We want to make it easy for [developers] to go from idea to code and code to cloud and cloud to the world,” he said. He centered the discussion on GitHub and announced Microsoft Dev Box, a cloud-based developer workstation.
- Microsoft Store Ads will help developers get their apps in front of customers that use the Microsoft Store. Nadella noted that Microsoft wants developers to bring their apps to the Microsoft Store “regardless of whether they were built as a native Windows app, a progressive web app, or any other app framework.”
- In cloud-native development, Nadella announced the general availability of Azure Container Apps, a Kubernetes-based serverless computing framework. In addition, Microsoft updated its Azure Kubernetes Service, adding integration with Draft, an open-source project that simplifies Kubernetes development.
- Microsoft Intelligent Data Platform was among the most important announcements at Microsoft Build 2022. The cloud-based data platform is a substrate that integrates databases, analytics, and governance, and aims to make it easier for organizations to work with their data estates. Nadella pointed to e-commerce as the most salient use case for Microsoft Intelligent Data Platform.
- Microsoft revealed that its Azure OpenAI Service is now in preview. The service partners with OpenAI to provide users with access to OpenAI’s technologies, including GPT-3 natural language model and Codex platforms, via Azure. Microsoft unveiled Azure OpenAI Service in November 2021 at its Ignite conference. “We are seeing a paradigm shift of large AI models becoming platforms themselves,” Nadella said.
- Azure Cognitive Services for Language now features capabilities for summarizing documents and call transcripts.
- Nadella announced Project Volterra, a native Windows dev kit with an Arm CPU and neural processing unit. It includes native Arm64 Visual Studio and .NET support and will be available later in 2022, he noted.
- In low-code/no-code, Power Apps Express Design will convert PDFs, PowerPoints, or hand-drawn image into apps. Nadella also announced Power Pages, a web platform that lets users without HTML experience quickly create websites.
- In collaborative apps, Nadella discussed a new Live Share feature in Microsoft Teams meetings, currently in preview. The update lets meeting attendees collaborate on apps that integrate with Microsoft Teams. “With Live Share, your apps can go beyond passive sharing so your end users can actively co-watch, co-create, [and] co-edit content together, making live meetings truly interactive,” he said.
Fitting with the times, Nadella also devoted time to discuss the metaverse. He went out on a limb suggesting that metaverse use cases were already upon us, perhaps the only place where Microsoft’s CEO stretched the imagination and embellished.
